Facebook?! Twitter?! Instagram?! We Did That 40 Years Ago

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Facebook?! Twitter?! Instagram?! We Did That 40 Years Ago

It all feels so new, doesn't it? Facebook. FaceTime. Google+ hangouts. Hashtagging your memories on Twitter and Instagram.
But this holiday season, as you and your enormous collection of Apple gadgets spend all your extra time connecting with distant friends and family over the latest and greatest social media services, it's worth remembering that all this social stuff was a long time coming.
Before Facebook and Facetime and Google+ and Twitter, there was Plato and the Bell Picturephone and the Dynabook and the Xerox LiveBoard. Social media is nothing new. It just has better packaging -- and better marketing.
LiveBoard doesn't ring a bell? You've never heard of Plato? It's time for a little history lesson (just click on the images above). Before you sit back with your eggnog and your iPad and your Tumblr, take a few spare holiday moments to appreciate the social media creations of decades past. Your Tumbling iPad wouldn't be here without Alan Kay's DynaBook. You'd be left with nothing but eggnog -- and a holiday hangover.

Above: Community Memory Terminal (1973)

Three decades before Yelp and Craigslist, there was the Community Memory Terminal.
In the early 1970s, Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski and Lee Felsenstein set up a series of these terminals around San Francisco and Berkeley, providing access to an electronic bulletin board housed by a XDS-940 mainframe computer.
This started out as a social experiment to see if people would be willing to share via computer -- a kind of "information flea market," a "communication system which allows people to make contact with each other on the basis of mutually expressed interest," according to a brochure from the time.
What evolved was a proto-Facebook-Twitter-Yelp-Craigslist-esque database filled with searchable roommate-wanted and for-sale items ads, restaurant recommendations, and, well, status updates, complete with graphics and social commentary.
"This was really one of the very first attempts to give access to computers to ordinary people," says Marc Weber, the founding curator of the Internet History Program at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Photo: Daniela Hernandez/Wired

Memex (1945)

Ah, but the Computer Memory Terminal was one of the newer social media ideas. Thirty years earlier, there was Memex.
OK, it wasn't much more than an idea. But the idea was so very modern. The Memex desk was a way to "instantly bring files and material on any subject to the operator’s fingertips,” according to an illustration of the never-built device.
In theory, the Memex would store information on microfilm and then index it using tiny holes punched into the film. A user would input a code on a keyboard, and the contraption would bring up the the right piece of microfilm, displaying it on a tablet-like flatscreen. "It would be like a URL, but with microfilm," says Weber, of the Computer History Museum.
Friends would pour over their microfilm spools together, punch new holes to cross reference new information, and, well, link all this information together. "It’s the idea that’s actually still very weak in the web, which is to be able to share bookmarks," says Weber. "There’s been a million schemes to do this on the web, but very few of them have stuck."
It was also designed to take photographs of your notes, mail, souvenirs, and pictures. In other words, it sounded a lot like the Moleskine Evernote notebooks that turned up on our Wired Wish List this year -- tools that translate your handwritten musings into searchable, digital files.
Image: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum

PLATO (1960)

One of the world’s first online communities accidentally grew out of PLATO, an online education system developed at the University of Illinois. A man named David Woolley built a platform atop the system called Plato Notes, a forum-like feature that allowed users to converse about various topics.
"Creating an online community was never part of the plan for PLATO, and if you think about it, how could it have been? None of us had ever seen an online community," Woolley explained during a recent PLATO conference at the Computer History Museum (video below). Plato was originally a system where students could study subjects like fractional distillation and the anatomy of the visual system. But Notes fostered interaction between these students.
"There were two kinds of notes. There were public ones and private ones, which were effectively email. And that just really took off," Weber said.
PLATO also evolved to include message boards, multi-user real-time chatrooms, instant messaging, news, and games -- i.e. all the stuff that the big social networks give you today.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/qmuN_RpXn6I
Image: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum, Mike Cape

Bell Picturephone (1964)

FameTime? Bah Humbug! In 1964, we had the Bell Picturephone, a futuristic telephone decked out with speakers, a video camera, a phone, and a monitor shaped like ET's head.
OK, after its unveiling at Disneyland, people lost interest. Few were willing to pay $16 to video chat for 15 minutes. Making a Picturephone call required booking an appointment -- and maybe even some, er, travel. It was only available in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
Image: A Bell Picturephone advertisement

DynaBook (1968)

"It’s the most important computer never built. It’s the ancestor of both the laptop and the tablet," says Marc Weber.
He means the DynaBook, a concept cooked up by legendary computer scientist Alan Kay in the late sixties. Kay described DynaBooks as "carry anywhere" devices that could "bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) of the world to the home" - a “personal computer for children of all ages."
The DynaBook -- which looks like the oversized offspring of an iPad and a Blackberry -- was designed to store about 500 pages of text or a few hours of music in removable magnetic storage files. "One can imagine vending machines which will allow perusal of information (ranging from encyclopedias to the latest adventures of wayward women)," Kay wrote, saying the contraption would sell for about $500, or roughly the equivalent of $2750 today.
He was a few decades early, but his predictions eventually came true. Think app stores. And the internet.
Photo: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum, Mark Richards

The SRI Van (1977)

The Stanford Research Institute van is the place where the internet, wireless networking, and Skype were all born. At least that's how Marc Weber puts it.
With this bread-truck-turned-mobile-research-lab -- which is now parked at the Computer History Museum -- early internet pioneers, including Vint Cerf, would connect to other networks via wireless packet radio. It played a key role in the evolution of TCP/IP -- the protocols that underpin the modern internet -- but it also foretold the sort of packet voice techniques used by services such as Skype.
Then there was it's knack for interfering with Vint Cerf's hearing aids -- but that's another story.
Photo: Wikipedia

Xerox LiveBoard (1990)

The black Xerox LiveBoard looked more like a behemoth flatscreen television, but it was really an interactive whiteboard. Using its 67-inch display, people could teleconference with other LiveBoarders and map out business strategies in the process. "It was like WebEx, 20 years ago," says Weber.
Sadly, it died in 2000. Only 2,000 modules were sold.
Photo: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum, Mark Richards

IBM Simon Phone (1993)

Simon -- IBM’s brick-like personal communicator -- was the original smartphone. It could serve as a personal organizer, but it could also send faxes, emails, and electronic pages. It lacked a mobile browser, but it did have apps like a note pad, a sketchpad, an address book, and, yes, Scrabble, all of which could be accessed by tapping monochromatic icons on its touchscreen.
The cost? $900. So, only slightly more expensive than an iPad.
Photo: Wikipedia

iMode Phone (1999)

Before the dawn of the smartphone, mobile browsing meant you were stuck in a text-only universe spanning only a handful of sites. But iMode changed that -- at least for the Japanese.
This Japanese creation gave users access to email, streaming video, weather information, maps, bookstores, games, and financial stats across thousands of graphic sites. These phones could also double as electronic wallets, able to buy soda at vending machines. “This was basically the mobile web back in 1999,” said Weber. “Japan was really way ahead in terms of sophistication.”
Photo: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

CompuServe (1980s, 1990s)

Social media only went mainstream after the turn of the millennium you say? As if.
Throughout the 80s and on into the 90s, proprietary online services such as CompuServe and AOL offered email, chat, forums, weather reports, stock stats, and travel booking. All you needed was a modem.
“All of these online systems were social in the sense that it was user-generated content with a lot of interactions between users. That was the model from the sixties on...These are all about people logging on and expressing themselves,” Weber says.
So there. Enjoy your eggnog. And your hangover.
Image: CompuServe ad from the January 1983 issue of BYTE magazine